Countdown to Oscars

Posts Tagged ‘David O. Russell’

This afternoon, the Directors Guild of America, the oldest and largest union of film and television directors, announced its five nominees for the 66th feature film DGA Award, which will be presented on Jan. 25. Their selections: Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron, Captain Phillips‘ Paul Greengrass, 12 Years a Slave‘s Steve McQueen, American Hustle‘sDavid O. Russell and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Martin Scorsese.

If DavidO. Russell gets nominated for Best Director this year, he will have accomplished something that MartinScorsese, WoodyAllen, AlfredHitchcock, FrancisFord Coppola and many other great directors have not–that is, to earn three Best Director nominations in the span of only four years. In fact, only eleven other directors have been on comparable hot streaks in Academy Award history, and only one of those streaks (by Clint Eastwood) has occurred after 1960. (See below for reference.)

This is not a comparison of overall quality or career prolificity (not many can bout with Scorsese, Allen, Hitchcock and Coppola in those categories), but merely a tribute to Russell’s ultra-concentrated efforts in the past four years and a recognition of the difficulty of this feat. It’s also a relevant because it might shed some light on previous Oscar trends and on what we can expect at the 86th Oscars.

The New Year is almost upon us and several Oscar contenders are hoping that with the new year comes new Oscar fortunes. Being overdue is a concept many trot out during the awards season, so I decided to take a look at some of the people in the race with multiple nominations that could possibly be shedding the Oscar bridesmaid label.

Being an Oscar prognosticator for over a half decade now, I’ve developed some odd habits. One of the things that I do that I know makes people question my sanity is posting my Oscar predictions for the another season as soon as the previous one has ended. I like getting a jump on things and actually started organizing contenders for the 2014 show a few months ago, but unless you’re as hardcore a film junkie as me, that’s crazy-talk.

Whenever Steven Spielberg decides to take up a new directorial endeavor, he doesn’t do it alone. He gets his stock company of talent on the phone, and once he has the gang together, they go off and make a movie. It’s certainly not the same as when Spielberg was making little films in his backyard as a kid, but in a way the spirit is still the same. One big difference, though, is that when these movies get made, Oscar often takes notice.

Spielberg films almost always receive Academy Awards attention. On his own, he has 15 nominations (one of which came for just producing Letters from Iwo Jima, which he didn’t direct), while his crew has gotten dozens of nods. The last film of his not to get at least a nom was The Terminal, and before that it was Always. Believe it or not, only one other flick he directed went without a citation, and that was his early movie The Sugarland Express. That’s a stunningly good run of nominated work, and while he deserves lots of credit, his stock company deserves just as much.

Spielberg’s newest film, Lincoln, has gotten the attention of the Academy, and that extends to his crew as well. The movie itself is nominated for 12 Oscars, and while Spielberg has a solo citation for directing to go along with a trio of acting nods, the rest of the dozen go to the Beard’s crew members (though he shares a Best Picture credit, too).

The road to the Academy Awards is a funny one. Sometimes it’s a straight path filled with expected winners, while other times it can be full of twists and turns. The latter doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, it adds a welcome bit of uncertainty to the job of Oscar prognostication. This year’s precursor season was one of the most unpredictable in recent history. There was no film in the pole position for Best Picture … at least, until now.

I recently cautioned readers to not necessarily anoint a frontrunner in the Oscar race before the Guilds began throwing their weight around. Ben Affleck’s film Argo was certainly in a nice position, but critics groups don’t have a say with the Academy. Guilds do, and now they’ve spoken. You never want to prematurely declare a frontrunner, but when the time is right, that’s another story entirely.

The Directors Guild of America, Producers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild have all honored Affleck and Argo. This trifecta has almost always meant an absolute lock on Best Picture for a film. In fact, the only time that hasn’t occurred is with Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. It had the same wins as Argo and also saw Howard denied a Best Director nomination like Affleck. Ultimately, events led to Braveheart and Mel Gibson triumphing on Oscar night over Apollo 13.

If you’re like me, you’re still recovering from the surprises that the Academy threw us on Thursday. In an attempt to try and move away from figuring out the “why” of the Oscar nominations last week, I decided to look at the “when” and “where” of the films and performances that were nominated. I’m curious to see which release period of the year and which film festivals were the most effective launching pads for award nominees in 2012.

It’s no secret that certain periods of the year and certain festivals are lighter than others. Fests like Tribeca and months like January just don’t jive with Oscar. In fact, I recently looked at the festival season in a previous article (found here) to see which ones contributed the most awards players this year. Likewise, when I removed the late-season releases a week or so ago from the Oscar race (found here), I found just how many contenders are from the last few months of the year.

Now that we have the nominees for the Academy Awards at our disposal, we can look at the main categories and see if there’s anything more we can learn. Did any one film festival wind up doing especially well? Was there a choice period of release for the movies and performances that were cited by Oscar voters? Let’s take a look …

I always enjoy looking at alternate versions of the Oscar race. It’s just an experiment, but there are still a number of interesting dynamics that I notice about the year in awards contenders when playing around with eligible films.

In years past, I’ve wondered what were the No. 11 films in the two years that Oscar had a guaranteed crop of 10 Best Picture nominees. I’ve also considered what the Oscars nods would have looked like if you removed every contender that was actually nominated. This time around, I’m trying something a little different.

With the Academy only days away from announcing their noms, I wanted to look at how the race would look if you took out any of the contenders that hit in the final part of the year. Essentially, if you disqualified the films that went into release after September, what might the Oscar nominations look like this week?

Audiences and critics around the globe love a good comedy. Comedies make you feel good inside and provide you with some temporary happiness and respite from the troubles of the world at large. They’re some of the hardest movies to make, and they’re appreciated by almost everyone.

The lone holdouts? The voters of the Academy Awards.

Since 1977, when the Woody Allen comedy Annie Hall won Best Picture, exactly zero full-on comedies have won the Oscar. Yes, Allen’s film had dramedy elements to it, but it was far more of a comedy than last year’s winner, The Artist, which would probably be the closest thing we’ve had since then to a comedic winner. Others in that sort of hybrid realm include American Beauty, Driving Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love and Terms of Endearment.

This year we have an unusually strong comedy contender in the David O. Russell film Silver Linings Playbook. Generally regarded as one of the five Best Picture hopefuls that can actually win the prize, it faces an uphill battle due to its humor, much as Les Miserables does with its low Rotten Tomatoes score (as I recently discussed here) and Argo does with its comparatively early release date.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with the actor Bradley Cooper for an extensive interview about his life, career and acclaimed performance opposite Jennifer Lawrence,Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver in David O. Russell’s dramedy Silver Linings Playbook. You can watch highlights of our conversation at the top of this post.